This is a remarkable book. Tom Boellstorff has successfully achieved the extremely difficult task of writing a book that will appeal equally to the general reader and scholar alike. Coming Of Age In Second Life is well written, very well researched and whilst it does not get bogged down in academic detail and theory, it does provide reference to such theories that undergird the author's research.

Second Life (SL) www.secondlife.com is a virtual cyberworld, created by Linden Labs, which is very similar to our own so called, real life (RL) world. You may buy or rent land, create artworks, build buildings, animals, speedboats and clothes or dance the night away at discos. All this is possible through an avatar, which you create and modify as you please. Your avatar is how you function "inworld". Everything we do in RL has its own virtual counterpart in SL. The realism, diversity and weirdness of SL is astonishing.

Tom Boellstorff is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He spent over two years doing fieldwork "inworld" as Tom Bukowski (his avatar's name). Boellstorff stresses throughout the book how he conducted his research in accordance with traditional anthropological procedure, methods and rigor. "The challenge I face is that I wish Coming Of Age In Second Life to be read and debated by several different groups of people. "...anthropologists, including graduate and undergraduate students. I also hope it will be read by scholars, students, and designers in fields like game studies, informatics, and science and technology studies. Another hoped for readership includes persons who participate in virtual worlds or online games". (p. 6) This of course includes those interested in SL.

The book is arranged into three parts, consisting of nine chapters. Part 1 Setting The Virtual Stage describes the subject and the scope of the inquiry; gives a brief history of the notion of "virtual worlds"; and outlines the proposed methodology.

Part 2 Culture In A Virtual World looks at Place and Time; Personhood; Intimacy and Community within SL.

Part 3 The Age of Techne discusses the political economy, especially creationist capitalism of SL and what it means to be "virtually human". The investigation and resultant findings concerning this last point may surprise some readers, as Boellstorff's conclusions are not exactly what we think of in popular terms as virtual as opposed to real or actual. The chapters are supported with excellent notes, a smattering of informative black & white illustrations, a Glossary, a good Index and an exceptionally extensive Bibliography.

I found Boellstorff's reportage of SL events, culture and social life to be accurate and reasonable and in accord with my own SL experiences and observations. They were neither understated nor overly dramatised, quite often he quotes an exchange between SL residents verbatim which will really give the reader a feel for life "inworld". The general reader may at times feel confronted with a little too much explanatory detail, and the anthropological scholar, perhaps too little! We should not criticize Boellstorff for this because the style of the book, as previously mentioned, is directed at a wide audience. The book should be read and appreciated accordingly.

It must be stated that SL is not a simple computer game, nor a trivial artifact of modern culture, and as this book points out in many different ways, it is a very serious concern for a large number of people. In 2008 there are roughly fifty thousand residents online at any one time. To quote Boellstorff, "By early 2007 there was one petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data in SL. At that point, were all the books in the Library of Congress digitised (about 30 million volumes), it would have been equivalent to only about 2 percent of the data stored inside SL" (p. 103). By any criterion this is a massive amount of information. This is partly the reason Linden Labs must have a capitalist structure built into SL - storage and retrieval of a large volume of data costs big money in the actual world, and incidentally, also requires a high degree of security.

For those who have not experienced SL this book will I'm sure entice them to open a free account with Linden Labs and spend some time "inworld". Further, this book without doubt will become a standard reference work over the years to come for all forms of investigation - both popular and academic, into virtual worlds and how they inform our actual world experiences and what they say about our future. I believe one of the book's most valuable attributes is that Tom Boellstorff (or was it Tom Bukowski) did the fieldwork wholly inside SL, and kept in mind Malinowski's dictum that the ethnographer should never lose sight of the goal, "to grasp the native's point of view". I think Boellstorff did exactly this.

Rob Harle is an artist and writer, especially concerned with the nature of consciousness and high-body technologies. His current work explores the nature of the transition from human to posthuman, a phenomenon he calls the technoMetamorphosis of humanity. He has academic training in philosophy of mind, comparative religious studies, art and psychotherapy. Rob is an active member of the Leonardo Review Panel. For full biography and examples of art and writing work please visit his web site: http://www.robharle.com

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